Specifications and benchmarks of Intel’s 32nm Medfield platform — Chipzilla’s first real smartphone- and tablet-oriented SoC — have leaked, and if I held stock in an ARM-based company like Qualcomm, Nvidia, or Samsung, I’d be a little jittery right now.

Behind every major semiconductor manufacturer a little-known but crucial company called Applied Materials has plied its trade for almost 45 years. Inside every Intel, GlobalFoundries, and TSMC silicon chip foundry, there are Applied Materials machines performing some of the finest handiwork known to man.

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, it used to be a seriously noteworthy advance when Intel or IBM or TMSC announced that they’d successfully crossed yet another nanometer threshold and moved their CMOS chip fab process down the micron ladder. In 1985, 1 micron — 1,000nm — was the state of the art, and was…